


things we lost in the fire

by astrxd



Category: How to Train Your Dragon (Movies)
Genre: a lament on the prolific stoick the vast and hiccup's struggles to live up to his name, insp by hiccup saying “you come into my home and sit in my FATHER’s chair....”, post-HTTYD 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-04
Updated: 2019-02-04
Packaged: 2019-10-22 00:51:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17652872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrxd/pseuds/astrxd
Summary: He’s known, for a long time now, that he wouldn’t be able to fill the shoes of his father. Every step that Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III would take in the name and wake of Stoick the Vast would never quite match up with the path left behind.He had been told time and time again that it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. With changing times came the need for a change in leadership. Still, his chest ached whenever he thought about his late father’s visions for him and their people… But it wasn’t the footsteps or shoes of the greatest chief Berk has ever had that Hiccup was worried about fitting--It was a chair.Three chairs, technically: a throne, a dining seat, and a grandstand.





	things we lost in the fire

****He’s known, for a long time now, that he wouldn’t be able to fill the shoes of his father. Every step that Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III would take in the name and wake of Stoick the Vast would never quite match up with the path left behind.

He had been told time and time again that it wasn’t necessarily a  _bad_ thing. With changing times came the need for a change in leadership. Still, his chest ached whenever he thought about his late father’s visions for him and their people… But it wasn’t the footsteps or shoes of the greatest chief Berk has ever had that Hiccup was worried about  _fitting_ \--

It was a chair.

Three chairs, technically: a throne, a dining seat, and a grandstand.  
  
(Things lost to the flame, things he’ll never see again.)

_The Great Hall._

At the head of the cavernous room was the first chair: sturdy wood, intricate carving, dents and scuffs and nicks along each and every edge. It was  _the_  seat of the Chief of Berk; it was  _the_  seat that every chieftain, since the beginning of their people, claimed when addressing the public. Somehow, it had lasted through the ages, even in spite of the fire that once ravaged the island on a near-nightly basis. So many life-changing and life-threatening decisions were made in that chair, always with the hope of the better of the people, but no matter how much Hiccup  _wanted_ to make the right calls for both Viking and dragon, he struggled to feel right -- about anything.

The chair was too big. Too revered. Too marked up with a rich history of righteous protectors that he was nothing like. When he sat in it, he felt nothing but discomfort with the rigid wood beneath and behind him. He didn’t think he quite fit the sharp, crisp angle of where the base joined with the back; he didn’t think that he looked quite right when he rested his elbows on either arm. He just didn’t think that he had the posture that the chair demanded of its chief.

But gods -- g _ods,_  did he try to be what Berk needed -- wanted -- him to be. Hiccup tried squaring his shoulders and raising his chin, he tried relaxing and thinking about every syllable of reassurance that  _this was his destiny, this was part of who he was_ supposed  _to be_ that he’s ever gotten.

(It didn’t exactly work, but he found comfort in a circle of other chairs placed beside his.)

_The Haddock residence._

It… It was more personal than the one in the Great Hall, for it was his father’s chair -- just his father’s and not the chair of every one of Berk’s chieftains past, for  _that_  one had been destroyed when he was a baby who still had a mother. It’s where Stoick sat for every meal they shared at home, for conversations, for rest after long days. When Hiccup was young, he was dwarfed by both his father  _and_  the seat whenever he clambered onto his lap, and even then -- two decades later -- he still felt small.

(Hiccup remembered being a boy, still too young to be outside as soon as night fell. He remembered pulling himself onto the seat with a fur wrapped around him while a raid took place, squeezing his eyes shut, clutching his old stuffed dragon to his chest, and begging to the gods that his father would come home already. He listened to the roars, the yells and the battle cries, the sound of hard-beating wings that made the walls seem to shake...)

Even after Stoick had passed, Hiccup was reluctant about using the chair, as if his father's ghost still lingered. In his eyes, the chair was more sacred than the Chief of Berk’s wooden throne. While he had to grapple with the difficulty of being a leader in the Great Hall, at home, he had to grapple with… With the absence of not a chief, but his father. His protector, the parent who raised him, the man who comforted his sleepless nights, guided and taught him, supported him,  _believed_ in him and his ability to one day lead and  _protect_  Berk better than all of the magnanimous Vikings that lead before them both--

For Stoick, Hiccup tried his damnedest to live up to the vision of chief that his father left him with. Hiccup knows, with all his heart, that his dad didn’t expect him to become great in the same way that he became great. Hiccup was to pave his own way.

...For Stoick.

For their people. For  _Berk._

_The Dragon Racing arena._

How many times had his father watched from the edge of that chair, hollering along with the rest of the Berkians, cheering on the competition -- cheering  _him_  on? How many times did Stoick glow with pride whenever he and Toothless zipped past with yet another sheep in their basket?

How many times did Hiccup let him down by skipping the scheduled race?

(How many times did he let him down in general?)

Stoick’s investment in Dragon Racing had been one of the many testaments of his open-armed welcome of dragons into their society. His father had been proof that change was possible and peace wasn’t a waste of time. It had taken time and adjustment, surely, but the ultimate outcome had been a paradise for both dragons and Vikings alike.

A lot had changed in the span of five years. There was steady growth, there was prosperity, there was balance -- and Stoick stood at the forefront of it all. Over the course of only  _one_ year, with Hiccup at the helm, change came even more rapidly, and it had been difficult. He’d been tested and challenged by the well being of his people (and their dragons) in ways that he could have never anticipated, and in situations that stumped him, he often found himself wondering what his father would do. He almost always came up with a solution.

_Three chairs._

One belonged to a brilliant and strong chief, another to an incredible father, and the last to a stubborn Viking who opened his eyes to the beauty of coexistence and peace. He was a solemn protector of two worlds.

They were gone now -- those chairs and those men… That  _man._

Last they were on Berk, the Great Hall remained standing, but most, if not all, other structures had been trampled and burned -- his home included. The race stands that they built on the edge of the island had been devastated, too, and whether or not the remains had been sacked was beyond him. Was the wooden throne of Berk’s Chiefs still in one piece? Was the Great Hall preserved at all, with Stoick’s statue engraved into its exterior? What of the rest of its interior, and its painted shields and banners that immortalized the young revolutionaries that changed Berk?

...Hiccup supposed that it didn’t quite matter. They were among the things they lost in the fire, but true legends never lived on through the physical -- and it was never a chair, not even three, that made Stoick so  _Vast._  
  
(He only hoped that he could be half as great of a chief, father, and peacekeeper.)


End file.
